Every test by God is an invitation to transition from one narrative to another, from control to love, from orphan to son or daughter, from bondage to freedom, from fractured thinking to wholeness, from our perspective to His, from our best thoughts about who He is, to the truth about who He is, from our story, to the whole story; the one He is telling.

I believe God is always saying one thing: “I love you.” And He always follows up with a question, “do you believe me?” What would our lives look like if we could answer this one question that God is always asking?

“Mercy by itself isn’t enough. Jesus didn’t just come to set us free from sin; He came to empower us into righteousness.”

The Father never turned His back, He never left, or forsook Jesus, He never abandoned, not even for a moment. His love was just as good as it’s always been.

The key to freedom isn’t about not being offended, it’s about keeping no record.

Jesus never once was “prone to wander” or “prone to leave the God He loved.” He came to earth to settle that exact issue once and for all. He came to set us free that we too might see, encounter, and become love; that we might be transformed from prone to wander to prone to love Him!

Discovering our Fathers pleasure is the most empowering thing a Christian will ever do. The opposite is true, believing Father God is angry or displeased will lead to an insecure and survivalist faith walk. Here are five signs you may be serving an angry or “displeased” God.

Control, it masquerades in the religious rhetoric of holiness; its wars are holy, its politics, its inquisitions, its crusades, its genocide, its prejudice, discrimination, racism, sexism, its abuse – all painted with the brush of fanatic righteousness.

In this highly charged political season of us and them, we must not find our belonging in a political party or persona. Otherwise, we become lost.

A true dream, one that is birthed in the heart of “old men dreamers,” carries with it authority and power. Only a person who has experienced the death of vision, who has nailed vision to the cross, has access to the power of resurrection. When he dreams again, he dreams the dreams of heaven. And a dream that’s birthed in heaven has power to transform earth, it can change a family, a neighborhood, a city, a nation, it grows exponentially and has eternal significance.

Long ago, I made Jesus, sovereign love, my hermeneutic, my “methodology of interpretation,” (6) the lens through which my entire theology is defined.

I’ve often described how leading A Family Story these past years has felt much like exploring the best route up a mountain while people are following you.

It’s been an exhilarating adventure filled with joy, breakthrough, and revelation. It’s also had its share of wrong turns and backtracking.

It can be a challenge to cast vision while backtracking. But there has been nothing more transformational than the goodness of God we’ve discovered through pioneering!

When it came to a particular chapter in Prone To Love, one of my pastor friends raised an alarm regarding my thoughts about the sovereignty of God. I had written an entire chapter under the title, “God Is Not In Control” and that thought bothered him. He felt it was an incredibly flawed idea. He was also concerned it would cause distress and confusion in my reader. He suggested that promoting the idea that God is not in control would be the equivalent of “pulling the string that unravels the universe.”

And when the valley of the shadow of death is upon us, that’s when we must know to our core that our Fathers nature doesn’t change. God isn’t fickle. He hasn’t gotten tired of us or changed His mind about us. He hasn’t turned His heart from us; He’s not judging us or condemning us. He is still the same always-good Love He has always been.

David experienced the valley but the valley was never God’s heart for him. Jesus went to a cross. But the cross was never His focus. Death is never the focus with God, He is always and only about resurrection. Jesus said He came to give us life and life more abundantly (John 10:10). Jesus—the Father revealed—was focused on the joy of resurrection life.